Salvador Litvak

Salvador Litvak (born 1965) is an American screenwriter, film director and producer who, with his wife Nina Davidovich Litvak, co-wrote the movies When Do We Eat? and Saving Lincoln. Litvak also directed and produced both films.

Litvak was born in Santiago, Chile in 1965 and came to the United States at the age of five. The rest of his childhood was spent in and around New York City. He majored in English at Harvard, where he lettered on the heavyweight rowing team and graduated with honors. He then moved on to NYU Law School, earned his Juris Doctor degree, and passed the New York State Bar Exam.

While attending law school, Litvak mounted a series of multimedia performance art pieces in Greenwich Village. After finishing law school, he took a job as a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Skadden Arps while continuing his writing. After two years, he left the practice of law to enroll in the graduate Directors' Program at the UCLA School of Theater, Film & Television, where he earned a Master of Fine Arts degree.

While at UCLA, Litvak won an MPAA scholarship, the Carol Sax Production Award, and the Edie & Lew Wasserman Film Production Fellowship. He directed a music video for three-time Grammy nominee Suzanne Ciani and made a short called Dick & Slick Go to the Restaurant, which won a Spotlight Award for Comedy of the Year. His 30-minute 35mm thesis film, Great Harry & Jane (1994), won an award from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.

After graduating from UCLA, Litvak worked as a script reader at Creative Artists Agency (CAA) and as a film professor at Antelope Valley College.

His first feature film, When Do We Eat?, was released theatrically by THINKFilm in 2006.

Litvak followed it up with Saving Lincoln in 2013, based on the true story of Abraham Lincoln and his self-appointed bodyguard, Ward Hill Lamon. Saving Lincoln features a visual style invented by Litvak named CineCollage, in which live action elements are inserted into 3D environments composited from vintage photographs.